Francis Parkman (1823-1893) conceived the idea of writing what he called his “forest epic”, a history of the struggle between France and England for control of North America, while still a student at Harvard. Between 1865 and 1892 he published the seven works that comprise his France and England in North America: Pioneers of France in the New World (1865); The Jesuits of North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867); La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869); The Old Régime in Canada (1874); Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877); A Half-Century of Conflict (1892); and Montcalm and Wolfe (1884). Parkman worked closely with a French collaborator, Pierre Margry (1818-1894), who obtained copies of documents for him and who was an important historian and archivist in his own right.

Parkman deeply admired the courage and faith of the French missionaries, the audacity of the French explorers, and the skill of the coureurs de bois, the Canadian-born woodsmen who conducted the illegal fur trade. He concluded, however, that French power in North America ultimately was doomed by the rigidities and weaknesses of the absolutist regime in pre-revolutionary France. Later historians revised many of Parkman’s conclusions, but his 3,000-page work remains a landmark of American historiography and literature.

Religious differences between Catholic France and Protestant England loomed large in Parkman’s work. Parkman, a Protestant, discussed reactions to his The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century with the eminent Catholic historian John Gilmary Shea.

An influential Bostonian, Parkman persuaded the U.S. Congress to help subsidize the publication of Margry’s massive compendium of documents, in part so that he could obtain access to materials that he needed for his own research.

Parkman was widely read in 19th-century America. Excerpts from his works were consulted by American tourists when they visited such historic sights as Fort Ticonderoga, Quebec City, and other scenes where battles between the French and English took place.